whirled peas though a soup of ideas

Category Archives: 30 days on turmeric and sprouts

today am on a new minimized controlled fast of 100mcg Modafinil at break of dawn and one meal of sprouts, and Vegan Turmeric Sauce at 2pm. the only change from Monday is the reduction of 200mcg to 100mcg. i rationalized it’s simply because the recommended 200mcg is for folks on a SAD diet. no greasy burger and fries here. the 200mcg on Monday nights sleep kept me waking between REM sleep cycles. from pharmacological serum studies, the Modafinil half-life is eight hours. given the controlled fast the effect will be heighten. additional foods will only weight down my thoughts same as a heavy lunch has on office workers. think i will add the ripe avocados to the sprout and Vegan Turmeric Sauce. want to do same controlled fast three days straight to find if the Modafinil effect is less diminished. at 200mcg Modafinil, it felt as if 10% effect less cognitive benefit each consecutive day. i’m guessing less saturation will have a less diminishing effect. i’d be happy if the diminished effect feels like 5%. obviously, this is a subjective feel and not an objective measure.

add of listening books

yes, we’ve all heard the studies of efficiency loss in multi-tasking. but aside from hearing guitar (on iPad and a real acoustic guitar) music i’ve created in the mornings, i’d like to begin listening to my Audible library books. one last one was Anita Moorjani’s “Dying to be me”. then “Smarter, Faster, Better” by Charles Duhigg. i really want to start and finish Dr. David Perlmutter’s “Grain Brain” and “Brain Maker”. this may be a fun mental exercise.

technique is important though. i will be using my bluetooth LG HBS730 headset where at any moment the book can be paused. without a readily available pause and restart, listening to a book throughout a day can be detrimental. given all the coding breaks i take it ought to be quite a complement. listening to new streams of thought helps me to be more creative as my thoughts escape being stuck in a trough.

start of exercise

days on farm are expected to stay warm and sunny the next ten days. i feel the need to begin an exercise regimen. not so much to help loose weight as to increase blood flow. a rebounder is sitting beside me. want to find some metric to capture degree of blood flow increase. the only exercise i’ve had has been normal chores and sitting on the KneeAir Chair. it’s funny how even after a year being on my 42 acre farm, there are spots i’m still discovering. carving out a perimeter running trail ought to be interesting. figured a run might take twenty five minutes.

a coding day

almost any entire week was spent in discovery of chat technology. second to being stuck, discovery can consume lots of time for a programmer. good timing too as i’m coding an Android POC chat app. even a basic implementation of a chat app is intensive. hence the high risk.

at the break of dawn yesterday, i took a 200mcg Modafinil. then at 2pm had a bowl of the days lentil sprouts with the Vegan Turmeric Sauce. that’s it. nothing more was consumed aside from sunflower seeds traveling to a local library. the entire day my mind had a beautiful zen-like focus. though i feel the recommended maximum 200mcg Modafinil is for folks who have a typical SAD diet and since mine is minimalist, i’m going to reduce the Modafinil to 100mcg and likely i may be able to take 100mcg Modafinil on consecutive days. i sense this since the Modafinil at 200mcg predictably interfered a bit with my sleep.

it’s a neat experiment i’ll begin tomorrow. this morning, i drank a cup of French Press coffee and need a break from the 200mcg Modafinil yesterday morning.

oh and i appear to have lost pound. generally, there are two weights the food in transit and the rest of the body weight whether fat of muscle. likely the pound lost was food in transit. no matter, i’m happy to go down a pound.

am back on Modafinil today thank goodness! it’s critical to take alternate day breaks from Modafinil else it will progressively lower it’s effect. as an experiment and because i was greedy to be super productive i took the standard 200mcg Modafinil immediately upon waking four consecutive days. physiologically, on the four day, the brain boost felt 60% of the original first day. my focus this weekend was lousy likely because i rewarded myself with super delicious vegan foods in a vegan potluck gathering in Colorado Springs. on departing, i found myself telling Kevin last, a vegan fellow i barely met as he was leaving Colorado, “it’s mind blowing the power of sprouts, turmeric, and Modafinil”. think i will do that today Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. no more consecutive days. the days i take Modafinil, i’ll only consume two green teas seeped twice, a lentil sprout harvest, and the Vegan Turmeric Sauce. in evening followed by a Throat-Coat tea which i love to taste. this truly is “eating my own dog food”. in addition to all three being brain boosters, that minimalist food consumption is also like a mini fast. or as i prefer to think of it, a controlled fast. Modafinil helps to lower food craving so likely i’ll be able to defer sprouts and the Vegan Turmeric Sauce till later afternoon. am thinking 2pm to allow sufficient time for food to digest. 5pm could be a burden since my GI will be trying to digest food while starting sleeping. this is a double win since any evening food craving may be stubbed. my acid test is whether i will be able to code better those days. also, almost three hours of time is saved in the day from preparing breakfast cereal and a dinner salad. efficiency in coding. some things of course are a discovery path. discovery is hit and miss. like the chat tool based on Jabber/XMPP i’m building now. tools for that are all over the place. but after two days Saturday and Sunday, only one download example appears to be viable. that was not a coding effort, it was simply discovery. still have yet to make the example work but at the very least it can be a basis. to not waste brain power on discovery, i may shift attention to another POC that can use a solid attention on coding. discovery can be done on non-Modafinil days. that may be optimum path.

a Login and Register Proof-of-Concept (POC) app

the POC_LoginAndRegister was completed last week and was last posted as version 1.3 on Google Play. i’ve always wanted to create this POC and in the past spent days coding parts of it but never to completion in a comprehensive nutshell. it seems the diet is doing it’s magic. the POC can be found by searching for “brainyideas” on Google Play. it took nearly four days of tending to. prior to having started the 30-day Sprout and Turmeric diet even as i was eating relatively healthy vegetarian foods (i reverted to remaining vegan a half year ago) the quality of that work would easily have been two or three months vacillating on designs and code structures. what’s really neat about this POC is that it can be used by any other Android app needing a registration and login. forming the Login and Register was fairly straight forward. coded in native Android as a client and PHP script with MySQL as the server. the user flow requires the user to validate email in order to be able to login. the Forgot Login was a bit more involved as that required an email to change any of the registered attributes for first name, username, email, and password (with two fields to avoid being locked out). i’ve never seen the full options available on other sites but at the very least it gives an opportunity to change the public username. this is handy when the user has opts to change an initial choice. people change email all the time also. first name well that’s simply private for communication between a company running the software and the user. so the name may have started as Missy but changed to Misty for example. the password is also protected and saved as a user field in the database with SHA256 in 64 hex characters. even a developer having access to the database entries cannot tell what the password is.

took 200mcg of Modafinil today at 5:30am. that’s one entire pill. the past two days i took only 100mcg. i will need to break after today. sounds fine since i will be traveling on Wednesday. the Modafinil has given to me an amazing ability to focus. my eyes are straight on what i’m doing. the 200mcg feels more that twice the “amount of focus” than 100mcg. the pharmacology effect is not linear. i feel i can achieve projects in short time. apps in particular. the effects of Modafinil sit atop my zen-like clear mindset. think i may be actualizing. i’ve always wanted to do that. its a fun ride like the “Powder” movie kid that evaporates into energy. never imagined it would happen to me in my lifetime.

dreams today

a few weeks ago i asked my brother. what would you do if you awoke this morning with an IQ of 200? his answer was go to the university and finish, find a better way to make money, get out of debt. i then told him i figured out that question for myself. within one hour i would discover that i’d like to get even smarter. that is not greed just i think a progression of the human mind to explore and discover. then i asked him what would you if you awoke this morning with an IQ of 160? he paused and said well.. the same i guess. so then i asked what about awakening with an IQ of 130? another pause ya well.. the same. so what if you woke up today with the same IQ? would your plans and actions change? a long pause, no i think they’d say the same. so why aren’t you doing that now i asked (only in the sense of discovery like a child might question)? i answered my own question as well. i’d like to get smarter faster – today.

hey Miche, i love love the smell and taste of coffee and my though efficiency is spectacular the first day (after not having drank coffee previous days), the days after, if i continue taking it at the same quantities, my thoughts (and body) simply slog though the days. guess its great the first day.

from the neuroscience and pharmacology perspective i would imagine there is a slope for recommended daily caffeine consumption so that the same “wired high” can be had the second, third, and maybe more days until of course saturation takes over.

guess i’m a born-again wienie for shifting to twice per day of two bags of green tea a day and both reused once. also, it’d be great to hear your thoughts on the virtues (and banes) of Modafinil from the neuroscience perspective. i’m finding the focus is amazing if taken on schedule no more than three times per week and alternating days, say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

how to gauge intellectual prowess?

so you woke up this morning groggy or sparkly. what are ways for you to measure your intellectual well being (assuming of course it is multi-dimensional)? for example, you can greatly preform better at guitar strumming today but blow at a geometrical puzzle. a simple first clue may be noticing the toast tore while pulling it from the toaster. the options i’m considering are creating music, learning a new spoken or programming language, building new apps, reading news, catching up on algorithms or game theory, listening to TED talks. etc..

i’ll occasionally post a seven minute ditty of my morning’s play created on Garage Band -> Smart Guitar -> Minor Pentatonic. i’m sure it’s simply god-awful to anyone else but i actually do enjoy listening to my own creations these days. the measure isn’t so much is todays music bearable? the measure is how much more bearable todays music is compared to past days. is there a progression of more bearable or put simply likeness? having been tortured as a loving captive audience, any parent of teens with kids in band will empathize. i’ll be posting the songs at the bottom right.

today is the last day of the Sprout and Turmeric Diet Try 2 experiment. i’m happy to have lost 10 pounds of weight and gained a beautiful zen-like mindset. i’ve debated if its possible for me to eat out. i think not in the near future, at least not this year. this zen-like mindset is my precious as the ring is to Gollum in Lord of the Rings. as the author of “Living Posthumously” stated on NPR radio, this diet is exactly what i would have done had i died and received a chance to live again. granted there were numerous mistakes but that’s what experiments are about. besides i’m awesome in creating mistakes, i was born that way. algorithms to harness mistakes are central idea behind genetic algorithms. Pareto’s 80/20 law likely holds in recipe mistakes, although my innate Modus Operandi is in the order of 70% order and 30% chaotic mistakes.

Try 3

Try 3 of the Sprout and Turmeric diet will definitely include lots more variety. the discovery process is messy and chaotic. when i’m ready for order i’ll begin Try 3. believe it or not, i learned this lesson in an algebraic class while attending the University of Texas at Austin one semester. a glance at the mathematics between prime and composite numbers brought me to the abstract thought that order and chaos are entwined – one without the other is meaningless. the queen of the sciences is beyond the realm of physics or any other science and there it was staring at me, a black and white abstract concept. one personal offshoot is, i only trust folks who are a little crazy.

effect of a clear mind on app progress

i’ll post app developments on this same blog. more because i want to leave a trail of progress on how a clear mind diet can accelerate mobile app creation. like any aspiring artist wearing a heart-in-sleeve, i will only be posting apps after they are released on Google Play or the App Store.

weight loss

at the start of the Sprout and Turmeric diet, i was expecting one pound a day loss. i suppose it stands to reason that a full belly throughout the day is likely going to lead to less than a pound a day loss. the incremental diet changes allowed me to pinpoint problem spots. considering i’m likely to weigh 158.0 pounds tomorrow morning, the total weight loss in 30 days is 10 pounds to average 0.33 pounds per day. not too shabby, especially considering the many mistakes.

final diet:

breakfast

vitamin B12 methylcobalamin taken sublingual

green tea and re-use twice for best extraction

a half cereal of 1/4 cup oats, 1/8 cup blend flax and 1/8 cup chia seeds (the flax and chia seeds ground in the Burr Grinder), one apple sliced, one banana sliced. a sliced Papaya. the fruits may vary.

lunch

a soup of one bell pepper, three chopped Portobello mushrooms, three broccoli pieces, a half cabbage, and enough water to cover. let cool. fill a bowl, mix a tiny spoon of kelp for 135mcg iodine, and two heaping tablespoons of the Vegan Turmeric Sauce. place the rest of soup in the refrigerator.

a drink of only one cup of Aloe Vera juice

three red grapes

one Kiwifruit

dinner

a salad of the days sprouts, one whole tomato sliced, sliced red onion, one large avocado, a squeezed lemon with all the pulp pulled out, and a swig of apple cider vinegar.

nightcap

one Theanine Serene pill, 5mg of Melatonin, and an 80mg aspirin

changes after this diet experiment

regarding coffee, forget it. the coffee taken a half-cup in mornings four days consecutively destroyed my zen mode and worse on this last day 30, i’d awaken at the end of every REM sleep cycle. i’m sticking to two green tea bags per morning for my caffeine fix.

for morning supplements, after getting a job or being wildly successful in building apps, i’ll later resume one pill per morning of Garden of Life RAW PROBIOTICS for MEN 50 & WISER and a swig per morning of Qunol Liquid CoQ10 taken sublingually. both are pricey at $50 and $29 per bottle respectively!

for cereal, i’m immediately adding soy with 32mg DHA (only enough to soak the cereal) and raw unfiltered honey for the L-Carnosine and many other health benefits.

for lunch, i’d like to revert to a half cup of cooked brown rice and cooked (not from can) black beans upon occasion instead of the soup.

for the juice drink, turns out having more than a cup of aloe vera drink can be hazardous (see That Sugar Film). it’s super healthy to a degree. also the Cran-Pomegranate is just plain sugar (see That Sugar Film) so it will be consumed slowly and not repurchased

for salad, black olives were removed due to the excessive salt. i hope to find unsalted black olives.

a departing chaotic gift (written day 31)

from day 1 of this diet experiment, i’ve taken to record daily morning seven-minute ramblings on iPad Garage Band app -> Smart Guitar (it’s hard to play anything too awful) -> Notes | Minor Pentatonic and adding A to Z bars for four minutes of record time. short of wiring a plethora of EEG electrodes (been there done that) to find more intelligent life in my little brain, i’m black-boxing any evidence by trying Garage Band, my acoustic guitar, programming mobile Android and Swift apps wickedly fast, etc.. telling folks i can now read lots faster is a white-box observation and difficult to prove. plus i loath wasting precious time on tests. on a minor note (pun intended), even as a Google Play subscriber, it’s really hard to find music able to help me zone mesmerized in thought to help me code efficiently. radio music is even worse. i’d likely spend an entire day flipping radio stations with a remote probability of chancing upon a three-minute ditty. figured, if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. oh and i do “eat my own dogfood” by loop playing my creations mornings to noon.

i’ve wanted to measure my water use the past ten years and what the hey i’ve figured to start now having saved two receipts. so my 3rd world solution goal is to survive off of one gallon of water a day. i had this goal even before working four years (2006 to 2010) amongst scientists deeply enmeshed in every issue to do with water at the Global Institute for Sustainability at Arizona State University.

to bear out my use, a simple tally of receipts occurred to me. yes, how often do i buy five-gallon jugs of water? to keep the tally simple on days I’ve bought water the amount is now listed italicized at the bottom of blog postings. just from the twenty-five gallons i’ve consumed the past ten days a first rough estimate is 2.5 gallons per day and that includes two teas, soup, and showers! still i think there is room for improvement.

Fontus has a new product out able to extract 0.8 liters per hour. you can see a practical description in Biking Concept Can Fill a Water Bottle From Thin Air Every Hour. yesterday a librarian told me that Colorado Legislature House Bill 16-1005 was in place to be approved August 2016 to allow homeowners to collect 110 gallons of rain water run off. that’s two 55 gallon barrels of water. sure the rain didn’t hit my roof which is not designed to collect rain but isn’t it the same? and do i really want to spend gobs of money retrofitting a roof in a high wind area not speak of how to handle bird droppings? water condensed from thin air can supply my daily 2.5 gallons of water needs. also, a stipulation of the bill is that “the collected water would have to be used for outdoor irrigation on the homeowner’s property”. sure but there is no explicit term stating i’m prohibited from using the water first. especially my deodorant is natural plainly sprayed also vera. soap i have to make something like oatmeal and toothpaste maybe going back historically to ashes of corn tortillas (my father told me stories of yore before the toothpaste we know of today was invented) dunno yet only it cannot have salt. salt ruins the potential for plant growth.

the term “breath-atarian” was mostly heard in jest the past few decades. i guess it’ll be legal here in Colorado soon and i want to be on the edge of this technology. oh and the savings per month is $18.75 (= 3 ten day periods in a month x 25 gallons x $0.25/gallon from the local KOA) or $225 per year. yea for the off the grid little people!

i had already dismissed iodine and minerals benefits from kelp but after a chat with Georgie, who originally commented with a kelp precaution, i re-reexamined (is that a word?) the amount of kelp. turns out there was a super tiny spoon inside of the powder supplement container. two scoops of that supposed to supply 270mcg of iodine. this NIH recommended iodine chart suggested 150mcg daily. too much or too little can lead to hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. so the addition of one tiny flat spoon scoop in my cabbage and Vegan Turmeric Sauce was great and had only a tiny salt taste.

cabbage soup plus two Portobello Mushrooms & a whole Bell Pepper

a quick shop at Sam’s in Pueblo CO led me to a rampage of savings compared to the local grocery store (there’s only one in town, how quaint). so i opted to also boil in the soup Portobello Mushrooms & a whole Bell Peppers. the yum factor went one notch up and the likelihood of either increasing my weight is relatively nil (the morning weighings will bear that out).